Next to “How much is my case worth?” questions about the timing and duration of lawsuits are the ones I hear most often from railroad workers.

Timing is critical to lawsuits. If they’re going to protect their rights, workers need to know the window in which they have to report an injury, file an FELA suit or file a whistleblower claim.

This blog will answer those questions along with tougher, more, it-depends-on-your-situation queries like, “When will I get paid?” and “How long will my trial last?”

Read on for 10 answers to the most often asked timing-related questions about FELA injury and whistleblower claims.

 

1. How long do I have to report an injury?

There is no legal requirement. I know your company rules say to report it immediately or possibly by the end of your shift. But I am here to tell you that with the whistleblower amendments to the Federal Railroad Safety Act, you cannot (validly) be brought up on any kind of discipline charges for late report of injury. That is, so long as the delay was in good faith. In other words, report the injury when you know you have one. If that is two days later because the pain and soreness is not going away, then so be it.

Should I tell my lawyer?

The attorney-client relationship is a special one. Your railroad attorney is one of those people who needs to know your dark secrets and embarrassing history. (Like a doctor, your lawyer is required to keep it private.) Only by knowing what can be used against you, can your lawyer protect against the bias that such information can bring with it.

For example, I've had the railroad try and smear my client at trial by asking irrelevant questions about a DUI conviction from years before the accident. Because my client had already told me the details, I was able to show the jury just how ridiculous it was for the railroad to be bringing it up a trial.

In this post I’ll give you two examples of how being open and honest with me helped some of my past clients succeed in court, and one example where what the client kept from me meant a lawsuit doomed from the start.

So you're out of work on an injury. You go back-and-forth to the doctor’s offices. You go back and forth to the pharmacy. But there are lots of hours when you either sit at home or try and live as much of a normal life as you can. Did you ever consider that the railroad had someone following you and videotaping your every move? Because it happens more often than you realize. Eavesdropping and surveillance of employees by the railroad is common practice.

At first blush, it feels like a complete invasion of your privacy. But when you understand that the railroad begins from a position of distrust, you come to understand why they do it.  The railroad is trying to collect proof of you doing something which you or your doctors have said you cannot do.

If you've been hurt, you already know what money you're out of pocket.

You know those bills you couldn't pay. You probably know how to put together a wage loss claim for past wages.  (If not, here is a link to a wage loss calculator that takes the work out of coming up with your wage loss. It even allows you to include lost overtime.)

But if your injury is going to keep you out of work into the future, and you either want to settle your case now, or you’ll never return to work, then you have something called future wage loss.  Figuring out how much you will lose in the future can be a little more speculative, but if you take the right factors into consideration, you can have a solid basis to make a claim for the money that you’ll lose down the road. 

In this blog I’ll explain how to calculate future wage loss with an example from a recent trial that I brought to verdict.

When you get hurt at work on the railroad, what the company does behind your back could be worse than your injury.

Take for example, a shoulder injury or knee injury, both common injuries for railroad workers:

 

 

You reported your injury because you were too hurt to work, not because you wanted the railroad to pay up. Reporting it was the right thing to do. The railroad will discipline you if you don’t report an injury. But from the railroad’s perspective, “paying up” is always where this road leads and it’s prepared for court before you even decide to seek a shoulder surgery settlement or sue for your knee replacement.

In this post we’ll look at what happens inside the railroad when you report an on-the-job injury.

Here are four important behind-the-scenes moves you should be on the look out for if you filed an injury claim:

When a client asks me, ‘When does the railroad have to pay after trial?” I have to say, “It depends, because the fight isn’t over after the verdict.”

You’ve probably seen this yourself. You hear your buddy won a couple of million suing the railroad, but he hasn’t seen a dime yet. Most think that once the jury has spoken, the railroad has to pay up. Wrong. In fact, that is where the railroads really excel, because they enter into a starvation mode, where their financial resources come to bear in an effort to starve you out.

Here’s how:

There are generally two additional bites at the apple after a successful verdict. Take my client with a devastating eye injury. He was awarded $3.75 million dollars and hasn’t seen a penny.

Why the quick cash could leave you poorer in the end.

Your accident seems straight forward. You think you know your injury. You’re relatively confident you won’t need more medical treatment. You want to make up for your lost wages and pain and suffering, as quickly as possible. The railroad claim agent has said, "Give me a chance to settle with you before you get a lawyer."

In this blog we’ll look at why giving the railroad a chance to quickly settle your claim could leave you poorer in the end.

Setting aside the factors you do know, like how much you lost in wages, let’s take a look at the factors that you don’t know and how they can lead to a premature decision to settle with the railroad. Here are three things you don’t know, and how they could hurt you, if you rush to settle with the job.

 

Lost wages are an objective cornerstone of any claim resolution. If you’re trying to figure out the value of your case there are other factors to consider also, like the severity of your injury or how many years you have before retirement. Click HERE for more. But the starting place for every injury claim is this: How much did I lose in wages?

The concept of the calculation is straight forward. But the mathematics can get confusing. Let me break it down:

If you’ve been hurt on the railroad your first question is probably, do I have a case? Once you decide the answer is yes, almost assuredly, the next question is how much is my back injury claim worth? How much is my finger injury worth? How much is my knee injury case worth?

They’re important questions, because you want to make sure that the value of what you could recover from a settlement or trial is worth your time and sharing a portion of any recovery on legal fees.

There isn’t a calculator where you can enter an equation like:

Shoulder injury x 2 surgeries x 4 months off the job = Y dollars  

But you can get some idea of the worth of your claim by looking at several factors that we’ll take a look at in this post.

I get  several calls a week from  workers of every craft, be they electricians, conductors, signalmen, car cleaners, track workers or engineers, just to name a few, looking for answers to some basic FELA claims and lawsuit questions.

Because these answers pertain to all rail jobs I compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions regarding the basic steps to filing a FELA lawsuit against a carrier.

Here are the questions I'll cover in this post:

1. How early in the claims do I make a demand?
2. When will I learn what my case is worth?
3. Once I hire an attorney, how long until my case will be filed?
4. Once my case is filed, how long before I got to trial?
5. What happens from the time the case gets filed until the trial?
6. Will my case always go to trial, or do some carriers settle?
7. What happens at a FELA  trial?